American Media Institute

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American Media Institute
AMI Logo.png
Basic facts
Location:Alexandria, Virginia
Type:News Media
Top official:Richard Miniter, CEO
Year founded:2012
Website:Official website

American Media Institute (AMI) is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) news agency based in Alexandria, Vir. It was founded in 2012 by several journalists from The Wall Street Journal and Reader's Digest.

AMI seeks to provide readers with in-depth investigative reporting from an independent perspective. The organization produces original news and employs experienced former journalists from outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time Magazine and The Los Angeles Times. AMI states that the nonprofit model is essential in funding the costly process of producing an investigative news story that larger media outlets can no longer afford.[1]

Mission

According to their website, American Media Institute's mission is as follows:[2]

“

The American Media Institute is a non-profit 501(c)(3) investigative news service dedicated to public accountability by presenting original reporting in major news outlets. We offer exclusive content and promote it creatively to drive readers, reputation and revenue to major news outlets. In a world of spin and opinion, we provide an alternative; old-fashioned reporting that challenges the conventional wisdom with fact-checked, thoroughly documented reporting.[3]

”

Background

Founded in 2012, the American Media Institute's (AMI) primary focus is investigative journalism. Believing in "accountability journalism", AMI, according to their website, has two values, being first and being fearless. First is a reference to seeking out original content and not "recycling or recirculating the reporting of others."[4][2]Fearless is described as seeking out news stories regardless of public scrutiny or the reactions of others and considering only AMI's social "obligations" to inform the public.[4] AMI operates with transparency, making available their IRS 990 forms and their internal policies, guidelines, and governance documents.[4]

AMI offers three products to the reader, according to their website. The first is their Investigative Journalism Unit, which produces original news exclusively for news outlets. The unit covers national security, education, labor, economics and energy. All articles are fact-checked, documented, and legally vetted.[5]

AMI offers an Urban News Service, which provides news to urban newspapers and broadcasters. According to AMI, it is "news that celebrates, educates and empowers by focusing on school reformers, black entrepreneurs and local heroes while holding governments and special interests accountable."[5] AMI states that they are one of the largest suppliers to African American news outlets nationwide.[5] Their Urban News division focuses on five areas of news:[6]

  • The Hero No One Knows: The content focuses on African American heroes, policemen, civic leaders and others who contribute to their communities.
  • Entrepreneurs Among Us: This category shares stories from African Americans who own their businesses and the hurdles they face and the experiences they have to share.
  • Abuse of Trust: The content focuses on accountability, especially in politics.
  • Your Money at Work: This section focuses on "outrageous or humorous examples of government waste and institutional malfeasance."
  • School Reformers Vs. The Establishment: This content chronicles the struggle to improve access to quality education for African Americans.

AMI's third service is the AMI News Wire, which is a daily feed of original news summaries for media outlets. AMI targets local news outlets by providing them with briefs on national news. AMI launched this service August 5, 2015.[5]

Member news outlets[7]

Leadership

Below is the list of the board of directors:[8]

  • Jeff Ballabon
  • Heather Higgins
  • Keya Dash
  • James Lucier
  • Richard Miniter
  • Richard Perle

Finances

The following is a breakdown of the American Media Institute's (AMI) contributions and gifts received, total annual revenue and the organizations expenses for the 2012-2013 fiscal years, as reported to the IRS.

John Doe investigations

See also: John Doe investigations related to Scott Walker

Background

Two John Doe investigations were launched by Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm (D) into the activities of staff and associates of Gov. Scott Walker (R). These investigations and the events surrounding them have been described as "the most tumultuous political events in Wisconsin in generations—perhaps in history."[12]

The first investigation, John Doe I, was launched after Walker aide Darlene Wink noticed funds were missing from the money raised by Operation Freedom, a charitable event for veterans that Walker hosted annually. Walker's office turned the case over to the Milwaukee County DA's office to investigate the missing funds.[13][12][14]

Over a year passed before the DA's office began investigating the case. By this time, Walker had announced his candidacy for Governor of Wisconsin. On May 5, 2010, Assistant District Attorney Bruce Landgraf asked for the authority to launch a John Doe investigation into the missing funds. He asked for the John Doe on the premise of determining where the funds had originated (i.e., sponsors and donors of the Operation Freedom Event). His request was granted by Judge Neal Nettesheim, who had been appointed the John Doe I judge.[12][15]

During the 2010 gubernatorial campaign, the John Doe investigation was expanded multiple times to include a Walker donor and members of Walker's county executive staff. The homes, offices and cars of these people were raided and searched, and property, such as computers and cell phones, was seized. The investigation lasted three years and resulted in the convictions of six people, four of whom weren’t related to the missing funds on which the investigation was predicated. The announcement of the charges against the six were made in January 2012, in the midst of an effort to recall Gov. Walker due to his support for Act 10.[16][17][18]

On June 5, 2012, the recall election attempting to remove Gov. Walker (R) from office was held. Walker won re-election by a wider margin than he had when originally securing the office in 2010. In August 2012, the first John Doe investigation was rolled into a second investigation, John Doe II. This investigation was based on a theory that Governor Walker’s campaign had illegally coordinated with conservative social welfare groups that had engaged in issue advocacy during the recall elections.[19][20]

The second John Doe investigation spanned multiple counties but was consolidated into one investigation, overseen by an appointed judge and one special prosecutor, Francis Schmitz. During the early morning hours of October 3, 2013, investigators served search warrants on several homes and subpoenaed records from 29 conservative organizations. Several weeks later, on October 25, 2013, three targets of the subpoenas filed a motion to have the subpoenas quashed. The judge overseeing the investigation, Judge Gregory Peterson, granted that motion in January 2014, stating that the prosecutor's theory of criminal activity was not, in fact, criminal under Wisconsin statutes. Although Schmitz filed an appeal to a higher court, the investigation was effectively stalled.[21][22][23][24][25]

A series of lawsuits were filed, one against the John Doe prosecutors for a violation of free speech and several others against the agency that oversees campaign finance law, the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board (GAB), for trying to enforce unconstitutional regulations of issue advocacy groups, the regulations on which the prosecutor's theory was based.[26][27][23][28][29][30]

The legality of the investigation eventually went before the Wisconsin Supreme Court. On July 16, 2015, the Supreme Court ruled in a 4-2 decision to officially halt the John Doe II investigation. The court combined three cases into one, thereby simultaneously ruling on all three. In its ruling, the Supreme Court criticized Schmitz's handling of the case and declared the actions of Chisholm and Schmitz were violations of the targets' First Amendment rights to political speech.[31][32]

The Supreme Court, in interpreting Wisconsin's campaign finance law, ruled "that the definition of 'political purposes' [...] is unconstitutionally overbroad and vague under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and Article 1, Section 3 of the Wisconsin Constitution because its language 'is so sweeping that its sanctions may be applied to constitutionally protected conduct which the state is not permitted to regulate.'"[31]

The court noted that since issue advocacy is "beyond the reach of Ch. 11," Schmitz's theory of illegal coordination between Walker's campaign and social welfare groups was invalid. The court further declared "the special prosecutor's legal theory is unsupported in either reason or law," thereby declaring an official end to the John Doe II investigation.[31]

Regarding the other two cases addressed in the ruling, the court denied Schmitz's supervisory writ and affirmed Peterson's original motion to quash the subpoenas. It also ruled that the John Doe II judges, Peterson and Barbara Kluka before him, had not "violated a plain legal duty" by allowing the appointment of one judge and one special prosecutor to preside over a multi-county John Doe, though the court did concede "the circumstances surrounding the formation of the John Doe investigation raise serious concerns."[31]

In its ruling, the court ordered that "everything gathered as potential evidence—including thousands of pages of emails and other documents—be returned and all copies be destroyed." Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel (R) said the court's decision "closes a divisive chapter in Wisconsin history."[33][34]

AMI's involvement

In September 2014, Stuart Taylor, Jr., of the American Media Institute, published an article in Legal Newsline detailing what his source described as Chisholm's potential motive for so doggedly pursuing the John Doe investigations. In the article, Taylor wrote:[35]

“ Now a longtime Chisholm subordinate reveals for the first time in this article that the district attorney may have had personal motivations for his investigation. Chisholm told him and others that Chisholm’s wife, Colleen, a teacher’s union shop steward at a school in St. Francis, which is near Milwaukee, had been repeatedly moved to tears by Walker’s anti-union policies in 2011, according to the former staff prosecutor in Chisholm’s office. Chisholm said in the presence of the former prosecutor that his wife 'frequently cried when discussing the topic of the union disbanding and the effect it would have on the people involved … She took it personally.'

Citing fear of retaliation, the former prosecutor declined to be identified and has not previously talked to reporters.

Chisholm added, according to that prosecutor, that 'he felt that it was his personal duty to stop Walker from treating people like this.' [...] Still, Chisholm’s private displays of partisan animus stunned the former prosecutor. 'I admired him [Chisholm] greatly up until this whole thing started,' the former prosecutor said. 'But once this whole matter came up, it was surprising how almost hyper-partisan he became … It was amazing … to see this complete change.'

The culture in the Milwaukee district attorney’s office was stoutly Democratic, the former prosecutor said, and become more so during Gov. Walker’s battle with the unions. Chisholm 'had almost like an anti-Walker cabal of people in his office who were just fanatical about union activities and unionizing. And a lot of them went up and protested. They hung those blue fists on their office walls [to show solidarity with union protestors] … At the same time, if you had some opposing viewpoints that you wished to express, it was absolutely not allowed.'[3]

”
—Stuart Taylor

Samuel Leib, Chisholm’s private lawyer, responded to the allegations, saying they amounted to a "baseless character assault" that "is inaccurate in a number of critical ways." He provided no specifics. He added that "John Chisholm’s integrity is beyond reproach."[35]

One of Chisholm's previous supervisors, former Milwaukee County District Attorney E. Michael McCann (D), also rejected the notion that Chisholm's motivations were partisan, saying, "I knew who on my staff were the political people, and John Chisholm was not one of them until he ran for office."[36]

Dan Bice, of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, exposed the anonymous whistleblower as Mike Lutz, a former Milwaukee police officer who had worked in Chisholm's office as an unpaid community service special prosecutor between late January and early August 2011, "just as Walker took the reins as governor and just as all hell broke loose in Wisconsin." Lutz had also been a close family friend of Chisholm and his wife, Colleen, as Lutz's policing partner was Colleen's brother, Jon Osowski.[37][35]

After Taylor's article was published, Bice showed up on Lutz's doorstep on the evening of September 11, banging on the door loudly enough to wake and upset Lutz's 12-year-old daughter and prompt Lutz's neighbor, an off-duty policeman, to come outside with a gun drawn to investigate the disturbance.[38]

In his column the next day, Bice revealed that Lutz was, indeed, Taylor's source and also disclosed that Lutz suffered from PTSD after being shot on the job. Bice wrote that Lutz was formerly close to the Chisholm family before a falling-out ensued. Bice detailed an alleged voicemail in which an apparently intoxicated Lutz leveled death threats against Chisholm and his family. Lutz considered a libel suit against the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel as a result of the claims made in the article.[38][39]

On July 26, 2015, Lutz committed suicide in the presence of Menomonee Falls police officers following a "brief tactical situation." According to Wisconsin Watchdog reporter M.D. Kittle, "Multiple sources tell Wisconsin Watchdog that Lutz lived an agonized life in the years after he was shot while on the job in 2005. Things got worse, those sources say, after he went public about Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm’s 'hyper-partisan' pursuit of Republican Gov. Scott Walker."[40][41]

Recent news

The link below is to the most recent stories in a Google news search for the terms American Media Institute. These results are automatically generated from Google. Ballotpedia does not curate or endorse these articles.

American Media Institute - Google News

See also

External links

Footnotes

  1. ↑ AMI, "FAQs," accessed August 19, 2015
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 AMI, "About Us," accessed August 19, 2015
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Note: This text is quoted verbatim from the original source. Any inconsistencies are attributable to the original source.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 AMI, "Our Values," accessed August 18, 2015
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 AMI, "Product Overview," accessed August 18, 2015
  6. ↑ Urban News Service, "Story Types," accessed August 18, 2015
  7. ↑ AMI, "Member News Outlets," accessed August 18, 2015
  8. ↑ AMI, "Board of Directors," accessed August 19, 2015
  9. ↑ Guidestar, "AMI, IRS Form 990 (2014)," accessed January 19, 2016
  10. ↑ Guidestar, "AMI, IRS Form 990 (2013)," accessed August 18, 2015
  11. ↑ ‘’Guidestar’’, "AMI, IRS Form 990 EZ (2012)," accessed August 18, 2015
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 12.2 United States District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin Milwaukee Division, "Eric O’Keefe, and Wisconsin Club for Growth, Inc.," accessed February 23, 2015
  13. ↑ Free Republic, "Operation Freedom: Milwaukee County Zoo," July 1, 2005
  14. ↑ Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, "Authorities seize computer of Walker aide," August 23, 2010
  15. ↑ Wisconsin Reporter, "John Doe I judge says he’s not responsible for John Doe II," June 10, 2014
  16. ↑ Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, "Walker appointees charged in John Doe investigation," January 6, 2012
  17. ↑ Wisconsin State Journal, "New charges in John Doe investigation allege pattern of illegal fundraising among Walker aides," January 27, 2012
  18. ↑ Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, "Walker recall effort kicks off," November 15, 2011
  19. ↑ Wisconsin Government Accountability Board, "Canvass Results for 2012 JUNE 5 RECALL ELECTION," accessed July 2, 2015
  20. ↑ United States District Court Eastern District of Wisconsin (Milwaukee), "O'Keefe et al v. Schmitz et al," February 10, 2014
  21. ↑ United States Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, "ERIC O’KEEFE, et al., v. JOHN T. CHISHOLM, et al.," accessed July 19, 2015
  22. ↑ Wall Street Journal, "Wisconsin Political Speech Raid," November 18, 2013
  23. ↑ 23.0 23.1 State of Wisconsin Circuit Court Waukesha County, "ERIC O’KEEFE, and WISCONSIN CLUB FOR GROWTH, INC. v. WISCONSIN GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY BOARD, and KEVIN J. KENNEDY," accessed July 19, 2015
  24. ↑ United States Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, "ERIC O'KEEFE and WISCONSIN CLUB FOR GROWTH INCORPORATED, v. JOHN T. CHISHOLM, BRUCE J. LANDGRAF and DAVID ROBLES," accessed July 19, 2015
  25. ↑ Wall Street Journal, "Wisconsin Political Speech Victory," January 10, 2014
  26. ↑ United States District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin Milwaukee Division, "ERIC O’KEEFE, and WISCONSIN CLUB FOR GROWTH, INC., v. FRANCIS SCHMITZ, et. al.," accessed July 19, 2015
  27. ↑ Watchdog.org, "Target files civil rights lawsuit against Wisconsin’s John Doe prosecutors," February 10, 2014
  28. ↑ STATE OF WISCONSIN SUPREME COURT, "Citizens for Responsible Government Advocates, Inc., v. Thomas Barland, et. al.," accessed July 19, 2015
  29. ↑ Watchdog.org, "GAB, Milwaukee County DA bail on key provision behind war on conservatives," November 6, 2014
  30. ↑ Watchdog.org, "Federal judge’s judgment takes John Doe probe off life support," February 1, 2015
  31. ↑ 31.0 31.1 31.2 31.3 Supreme Court of Wisconsin, "Case No. 2013AP296-OA & 2014AP417-W through 2014AP421-W & 2013AP2504-W through 2013AP2508-W," accessed July 17, 2015
  32. ↑ Watchdog.org, "Wisconsin Supreme Court shuts down John Doe investigation, affirms First Amendment," July 16, 2015
  33. ↑ Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, "4-2 ruling halts inquiry focusing on campaign finance laws," July 16, 2015
  34. ↑ Wisconsin State Journal, "Supreme Court ends John Doe probe that threatened Scott Walker's presidential bid," July 16, 2015
  35. ↑ 35.0 35.1 35.2 Legal Newsline, "District attorney’s wife drove case against Wis. Gov. Walker, insider says," September 9, 2014
  36. ↑ Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, "Courts to decide whether John Doe a useful tool or unfair witch hunt," May 18, 2014
  37. ↑ Watchdog.org, "A whistleblower’s story: Taking on a ‘hyper-partisan’ district attorney," September 29, 2014
  38. ↑ 38.0 38.1 Legal Newsline, "Whistleblower mulling libel suit against Milwaukee newspaper over ‘death threat’ claim," October 6, 2014
  39. ↑ Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, "Source who accused Chisholm of vendetta has troubled past," September 12, 2014
  40. ↑ WisconsinWatchdog.org, "A tragic end for a John Doe whistleblower," July 27, 2015
  41. ↑ CBS 58, "Former Milwaukee Police Officer Michael Lutz dies from apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound," July 27, 2015
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